Making America Whiter Again: White Supremacy in Action

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

27 May 2026

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Senator Andy Kim, center, tried to de-escalate the worsening situation outside Delaney Hall. Credit: Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

There is nothing mysterious about Trump’s effort to curb legal immigration. White supremacy is the explanation.

Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 in large part because of this statement about immigration that he made when he announced his presidential campaign. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. …They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Aside from adding as an afterthought that not every immigrant is a criminal, Trump was clearly speaking up in defense of white supremacy and the United States settler project which has as a core belief that this country must be dominated by white people. His clear and unvarnished racist appeal played a big role in his unexpected defeat of Hillary Clinton.

White supremacy is still the unspoken rationale behind Donald Trump’s policy of severely limiting immigration from the Global South. While he is surely not the first president to use immigration as a political weapon, he is unique in not just pursuing the undocumented, but in curtailing legal immigration as well. The detentions, travel bans, and limits on immigration are actually detrimental to U.S. institutions, such as businesses that depend on immigrant labor and to colleges who need foreign students. But his priority is making America whiter again and that cannot be achieved without severely decreasing the numbers of people admitted to the U.S. The loss of labor and other consequences don’t matter very much to him. Not only does he want millions of people to leave the country, but his administration has come up with ever more cruel means to exact punishment upon immigrant populations.

In Newark, New Jersey, 300 detainees at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center are on hunger strike. They have written statements about the conditions they are living under, including spoiled food, lack of medical care, crowded conditions forcing detainees to sleep on the floor, and being held even after agreeing to leave the country, as they spelled out in a letter. “In these courts, judges inform the detainee that they can purchase a plane ticket to return to their country of origin, but the ICE officer denies that possibility, evidencing contradictions among government officials themselves. Likewise, there are cases of individuals who already have their voluntary departure signed and deportations approved by judges, waiting 2 or 3 months to be sent to their country of origin.” While the Trump administration makes claims of assisting in “self-deportation” those that accept the offer are still held at Delaney Hall and other facilities for months and are even denied the $1,000 payments they are promised.

On May 25, 2026 New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill tried to enter Delaney Hall and was turned away. Senator Andy Kim and Congressman Rob Menendez were able to visit and confirmed the existence of the conditions that detainees had reported. Protesters present tried to block ICE vehicles from leaving the premises in order to prevent a hunger strike leader from being taken away. ICE responded by pepper spraying those gathered, including Senator Kim himself.

The Trump administration’s onslaught against immigration from the Global South continues unabated. Recently legal immigrants have been informed that they can no longer change their status, such as applying for permanent residency green cards, without leaving the country. The directive is a classic Catch-22, because the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has essentially slowed the processing of green cards to a trickle, decreasing approvals by 50% in the last year. Anyone who risks leaving the U.S. to apply may never be allowed in again.

The violations of court orders and due process are continuing. A New York immigration judge ordered that arrests can no longer take place at immigration courts but the very next day, agents did in fact continue making arrests, in a direct violation of the judge’s directive. Citizens of 75 different countries can no longer apply for visas to the U.S. at all. Only four countries on the list are in Europe, twenty-three are in Africa and the rest are in Latin America and Asia. Even the World Cup of soccer is impacted as athletes from Haiti, Ivory Coast, Iran, and Senegal will play without the support of fans from their countries, who are now barred from travel to the U.S.

While the restrictions on Global South immigration increase, the fake “refugee” program for white South Africans that has admitted more than 6,000 people is being expanded to include an additional 10,000 people to be admitted to the U.S. despite the fact they meet none of the criteria for refugee status. The refugee program has been closed off to the citizens of every other nation while many of the South African newcomers speak English, have assets, and some even have social security numbers, proof that they have lived in this country before. The argument against the 75 nations banned is that those immigrants are more likely to seek public assistance but the admission of the prosperous South Africans will come at a cost of $100 million.

Trump says Haitians eat dogs and cats and Somalis are “garbage.” While these words get media attention, it is rare for the underlying cause of the vilification to be explored. White supremacy explains genocide in Gaza and attacks on Iran and Venezuela and Cuba and the effort to reduce China’s influence in the world, yet hostile acts are rarely described as being racist in nature.

Lest anyone doubts the racist nature of Trump immigration policies, consider that an ICE recruitment campaign openly used white supremacist language and themes. Other presidents conducted large scale deportation campaigns, but this administration is the first to actually announce quotas for denaturalization, a process which was always rarely undertaken.

Earlier this year Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed a white supremacist agenda at the Munich Security Conference: “This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.” There is nothing great or noble about Europeans invading the rest of the planet, yet leaders in European nations and in the U.S. are constantly whining about Black and brown people in their midst.

Perhaps Trump supporters should change the wording on their red caps to say, “Make America Whiter Again.” After all, that idea of white domination is central to their devotion to Trump. While millions of people recoil upon seeing the treatment of humans in detention or who are swept up by ICE, millions more proudly proclaim that is what they voted to see enacted.

The lawsuits and demonstrations are very much needed but brutal honesty is needed too. Racism is at the heart of much of what the U.S. does and denying that is the case only facilitates cruelty at Delaney Hall or against Iran. White power is the order of the day and that fact should not be covered up.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley@blackagendareport.com.